to answer here, it wasn't HOOKED on PHONICS in the 70's but it was phonics and phonetics. Hell, you could see phonics on Sesame Street and The Electric Company, both childrens shows that would explain how word sounds happened.. by sounding out each letter and then sounding out how the letters would sound when put together.. in the 80's a company put this together and the called it HOOKED ON PHONICS. this Hooked on Phonics was geared towards adults that were iliterate but later, it became obvious that the method taught to kids "WHOLE LANGUAGE" was failing and now Hooked On Phonics is being sold as a helpmeet to those kids that aren't getting the new fangled way of teaching..

My kids learn WHOLE LANGUAGE and when they come home, I have to unlearn it for them and then teach them properly.. I really makes me angry.

Basically Whole Language teaches a child to geuss at spelling from sounds and there are no "remarks" or " corrections" if the child misspells the word.. later, as they get older, they will learn to spell properly as they learn to use dictionaries.. (so riddle me this, how does a child who can't figure out the spelling and can't phoneticallysound things out determine where to look in a dictionary? honestly they can't and their scores show this time and time again)

anyways, you can see I am not to happy with the current way of teaching it, and am happy with phonics.. it worked for me dammit.

it was the 70's, by the 80's i was way into elementary school. i had the Hooked on Phonics stuff quite a while before starting school. frankly i can't remember how they actually taught stuff in school, i went to private church schools untill 5th grade so i don't know what public schools were doing. i do remember learning from McGuffey's Reader...

it wasn't in school, it was at home. maybe that's the confusion. and i was in the rural South Virginia/Tennessee area so there weren't really private schools either, more like 'Fundie Church School'. luckily i had a set of Encyclopedia Britanica to fill in the gaps.

i didn't know that it "fell out of favor" until i happend to rent a room from a 'teacher of challenged children' (she worked for one of those 'send your troubled teen on a wagon train through the desert to teach them responsibility' things), she showed me here masters paper which was a tirade against teaching by phonics... i thought she was sorta looney because it worked well for me. i also spent a year at another church based school where the study was self-directed, no teachers, just workbooks for various subjects that you would go through and then take tests (which were self-graded). i finally went to public schools for 5th grade upwards, but it wasn't until 8th grade Geography and then high-school History and Literature classes that i ever learned something that i hadn't learned from books or Encyclopedias beforehand. from what i read, American education has gone downhill even further since then.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say - said, pay - paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

requemao wrote:Would you native English-speakers dare read it aloud? I might, but......do you think you'd get it right on your first try? I know I wouldn't.

That is one of the coolest poems I have read... thanks for sharing it! And yes, I would read it aloud!

To me, reading English is like reading Kanji. If you notice, when you read English quickly, you end up taking in whole words at a time, rather than individual letters. This applies to basically every language where each sound/syllable is represented by one or two characters. Also, when one reads English words with different pronunciations for the same characters in different words, it ends up being the same as someone who reads the same kanji different ways in different context. The word itself will have a different pronunciation, even though it is written the same. The thing is, with Kanji, unless you have furigana, you can't take a guess at the pronunciation if you don't know the kanji. That is what makes reading Japanese hard, really...

I wonder where Tamil would rank on that language list... It's grammar structure is nearly identical to Japanese, and it has the same exact usage of conjugations... but I think it isn't as hard to learn to read and write [though it is more difficult than English].

Last edited by Tspoonami on Wed 08.30.2006 9:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It is difficult-compare it to French, with less than 100 irregular verbs, yet in English there are 620. Granted, the majority of irregular English verbs are only irregular in the past tense, however, on a scale this big it is really quite a lot. (Regular pattern is to add -ed onto the end of the infinitive verb).With verbs like "to take" it becomes "took" in the past tense, but with verbs like "to be" it becomes "I was, you were" which is even more irregular. French verbs typically only have one past tense version too.

Also verbs like "can". Read carefully...Present tenseI canyou canhe/she/it canwe canthey canPast tenseI could have you could havehe/she/it could havewe could have they could haveFuture tenseI will be able toyou will be able tohe/she/it will be able towe will be able tothey will be able to

I don't think that English is an hard language to learn. So far I've learnt several languages, including English, and I think that English is the easiest one. Comparing to some other languages (that I can speak), I found English as much easier language. As an example German, which has extremely HARD grammar, or Spanish, which has a lot of irregular verbs, or my native language, Croatian, which is probably one of the hardest languages in Europe. I started learning English when I was only 4 years old, that was my mom's idea, and I've never had any problems with English grammar or vocabulary. I can assure you that English, comparing to Japanese, Spanish, German or Croatian,is the EASIEST one to learn.

Zvono11 wrote:I don't think that English is an hard language to learn. So far I've learnt several languages, including English, and I think that English is the easiest one. Comparing to some other languages (that I can speak), I found English as much easier language. As an example German, which has extremely HARD grammar, or Spanish, which has a lot of irregular verbs, or my native language, Croatian, which is probably one of the hardest languages in Europe. I started learning English when I was only 4 years old, that was my mom's idea, and I've never had any problems with English grammar or vocabulary. I can assure you that English, comparing to Japanese, Spanish, German or Croatian,is the EASIEST one to learn.

Greetings

Or compared to the mess that is Russian: as my teacher used to say, Russian is 50% rules and 50% exceptions.